BREAKING THE GAME vs REAL-LIFE BDSM
Penny says - This is a question which someone asked me about chapter six of Breaking the Game. I thought the answer was important, so with the person's permission I am reproducing it here.
The question - In chapter six, Tatsumi uses the buckle quite hard and I remember that Tsuzuki's back was in a pretty bad shape at some point, very bloody, hurting, the whole enchilada.
My question: is that representative of REAL LIFE BDSM practices? Because I can't imagine someone going back to work the next day with such a level of pain inflicted on them.
Or (and I think it's probably more the answer here) did you have Tatsumi use that level of violence because they are shinigam? That they will regenerate in a few moments and therefore you had to make it that graphic for it to be somewhat reflecting what a RL situation would be (aka in RL there might be a bit of blood but the beating would be less intense so that there might be marks the next day but one would not be a bloody wreck).
Since they had rejuvenation powers, doing a BDSM scene with them and writing it like they were humans might not work because for them, it would just be like annoying mosquito bites... so you had to INTENSIFY the beating?
Because after all, Tsuzuki's back was already starting to heal (if not healed completely) by the end of that chapter.
I'm trying to figure out if that intensity of the BDSM description is because you are writing about Shinigami or if it's something that happens regularly to RL people.
Penny's response - Definitely the second of the two options. If I could have written Tatsumi and Tsuzuki as behaving like regular humans, I would have preferred to do so. Indeed, I did consider doing it, but eventually decided not to because it would be wrong for the story. The reasoning is, as you say, that Tsuzuki is a shinigami. For almost a century he's been doing fieldwork where he regularly gets beaten up quite badly, and what's more he heals from most injuries almost instantaneously. So he would require a much more intense beating to push him to the limits of his endurance.
There's also another aspect which I'm probably going to mention in chapter nine of the fic itself. Tsuzuki wouldn't necessarily want to be pushed to his limits every time, or indeed very often - there was an aspect of the experience that was highly unpleasant for him, obviously. But in chapter six Tsuzuki does want to be hurt a lot, even too much, because it proves beyond doubt that Tatsumi is finally willing to face up to both their sets of needs. The unpleasant side of the pain is nothing compared to the happiness of knowing Tatsumi is back with him. And in both chapters three and six, which were both "first times" in their own way, so Tsuzuki and Tatsumi were intensely excited.
And finally there's the consideration that Tsuzuki is a very extreme personality anyway, undeniably unstable and wracked by guilt, so he might accept a degree of pain that was more intense than he actually enjoyed partly for that reason. I don't like to play that aspect up in the fic because it plays into the "masochism=mental illness" fallacy, but it would be distorting Tsuzuki's character to claim it was totally absent. He's a masochist and he is prone to mental instability, rather than he's a masochist because he's prone to mental instability.
So there's four factors making chapter six in particular very extreme: the heightened emotions, the superhuman characters, Tsuzuki's personal psychology and the fact that the scene acts as a promise between them: "we are finally going to do this".
In real life, it's definitely not normal to hurt someone so badly that they can't, for example, go back to work the next day. Lingering marks are entirely normal, and a lot of people love to see them the day after a scene, but not wounds. A well bruised bum is a fun, saucy reminder of the previous night; genuinely not being able to sit down for the pain would just be a nasty problem. As with everything, there are a few people who would play in a more extreme way, but they'd definitely be a minority.
If a hit breaks the skin, it's usually considered to have been too hard, and the antiseptic ointment comes out. And flogging is only the most well-known BDSM activity. Tatsumi and Tsuzuki do it twice not because it's the only thing or even the main thing people do, but because it went badly wrong for them the first time, and they need to "heal" that first traumatic disaster before they can move on. In due course, they'd take an interest in less obviously intense things like clamping, hot wax, obedience training or more complex bondage (perfect for perfectionist Tatsumi!)
A Birthday Stroll would be more representative of their relationship in the long term, I think. In that fic, because he and Tatsumi are relaxed and familiar with each other by now, and because Tsuzuki's healing abilities don't come into the equation, he's able to get off on a more normal human level of stimulation.